Gary Shapiro
George Quasha: Words of Wonder
“Follow the bouncing thought.
It’s not an it even to itself.
Mind shows when the flow is knowing.”
Glossodelia Attract (preverbs), “woman at the heart of it all” 5
“Wonder further!” This imperative surfaces in verbal paradise, the first text in George Quasha’s “preverbs.” I would like to hear it as a call, somewhat in the vein of Heidegger and his more acute readers (say, Foucault and Derrida for starters) to think the unthought. Philosophy begins in wonder, as Aristotle says, but Quasha reminds us that thought and writing should persist in wonder, pushing the borders of the wonder-ful, being open to the future (a-venir), the e-vent, and the stranger, the unpredictable and incalculable, that which will arrive. Arrivals take many proliferating forms and shapes, as Quasha limns in his adventures with the luminal, the axial, the verbal and preverbal.
Perhaps it’s my professional deformation, but Quasha’s preverbs especially put me in mind of the gnomic sayings of the “dark philosopher” Heraclitus of Ephesus (no doubt others will think of the Tao te Ching or other texts). Heraclitus allowed Greek to speak in a memorably enigmatic way that has entranced and puzzled for 2500 years. “Listen not to me, but to the logos,” he instructs us, in a saying that requires us to do both, and then to think about how its performative complexity. Or “Follow the bouncing thought.” The word or thought (and logos) swings both ways, keeps things moving, a pervasive rhythm, wave, vibration rather than an inert, fixed and stable meaning. (Words should not be kept in stables or confined by digital writing programs.)
Just as we might be led through a song’s screened text by a bouncing ball, let’s give ourselves over to the thoughts that continue to expand, advance in new directions, or unexpectedly double back. There are words behind and beneath words. Quasha calls them preverbs, an archaic, originary language.
This not in the sense of the most ancient or with the most distinguished pedigree, but rather the logos that moves through all things, or the “bouncing thought.” An archi-writing, to adopt Derrida’s locution, Quasha’s thought – or shall we say the thought that seizes him? – bounces along in a jolly mood as it plays with paradox. Some bounces may bring us up short. “It’s not an it even to itself,” he writes. We want to name, identify, articulate, and classify the bouncing thought, the moving logos.
We’d like to think of it as an it. But there’s no it there; it’s process all the way down. The repetition of “it,” “it’s,” repetition, as Foucault observed of Andy Warhol’s soup cans or multiple Marilyn lips, is an emptying out of meaning, a self-consuming mantra. “It” is pre-verbal, not in the sense of being silent or dumb, but in enabling, opening up a space for words to play, to flourish, to open themselves and find meanings we and they never suspected.
“Mind shows when the flow is knowing.” All things flow. We do and do not step twice into the same river. Flowing can be knowing, and knowing (or gnosis) is always flowing. “Mind shows”: not that “mind” sits back on the sidelines and pronounces judgment to confirm that knowledge has been achieved, but rather that mind flares up; it shows itself, makes an appearance, when the flowing is a knowing. Thoughts are not in me, but I am in thought, said Charles Peirce when he was deconstructing Descartes’ mental substance.
Showing itself – this is an exemplary case of the middle voice, neither active nor passive, that runs through the bouncing thoughts and volatile thoughts that Quasha allows to speak out. Greek is a philosophical language; among other reasons, because of its well-developed middle voice. Some colloquial Anglophone analogues: “the situation unfolds,” “shit happens.” Phenomenology is a triumph of the middle voice. Heidegger lets phenomenology happen by recalling that the middle voice Greek phainesthai should be translated as “it shows itself.” The phenomenon is neither subject nor object. For Quasha language emerges and shows itself in preverbs.
Shine through or see through or more.
Every two is manyer than you think and a splitting y in the middle.
We fork by nature.
Glossodelia Attract (preverbs), “speaking animate” 12
There is a truly wonderful, wonder-inducing, generative, and originary dimension (an unmeasurable measure) here. Shining and seeing in this verbal paradise are always plural. If “man” is “a poor, bare, forked animal” (as Lear says), then the forking is “manyer” always a multiplying. Every two is more than two. To see only two roads diverging is short-sighted. Someone said: “There are two kinds of people, those who divide everything into two and those who do not.” The forking continues, we’re happy to wonder and wander further in Quasha’s verbal paradise.
“Follow the bouncing thought.
It’s not an it even to itself.
Mind shows when the flow is knowing.”
Glossodelia Attract (preverbs), “woman at the heart of it all” 5
“Wonder further!” This imperative surfaces in verbal paradise, the first text in George Quasha’s “preverbs.” I would like to hear it as a call, somewhat in the vein of Heidegger and his more acute readers (say, Foucault and Derrida for starters) to think the unthought. Philosophy begins in wonder, as Aristotle says, but Quasha reminds us that thought and writing should persist in wonder, pushing the borders of the wonder-ful, being open to the future (a-venir), the e-vent, and the stranger, the unpredictable and incalculable, that which will arrive. Arrivals take many proliferating forms and shapes, as Quasha limns in his adventures with the luminal, the axial, the verbal and preverbal.
Perhaps it’s my professional deformation, but Quasha’s preverbs especially put me in mind of the gnomic sayings of the “dark philosopher” Heraclitus of Ephesus (no doubt others will think of the Tao te Ching or other texts). Heraclitus allowed Greek to speak in a memorably enigmatic way that has entranced and puzzled for 2500 years. “Listen not to me, but to the logos,” he instructs us, in a saying that requires us to do both, and then to think about how its performative complexity. Or “Follow the bouncing thought.” The word or thought (and logos) swings both ways, keeps things moving, a pervasive rhythm, wave, vibration rather than an inert, fixed and stable meaning. (Words should not be kept in stables or confined by digital writing programs.)
Just as we might be led through a song’s screened text by a bouncing ball, let’s give ourselves over to the thoughts that continue to expand, advance in new directions, or unexpectedly double back. There are words behind and beneath words. Quasha calls them preverbs, an archaic, originary language.
This not in the sense of the most ancient or with the most distinguished pedigree, but rather the logos that moves through all things, or the “bouncing thought.” An archi-writing, to adopt Derrida’s locution, Quasha’s thought – or shall we say the thought that seizes him? – bounces along in a jolly mood as it plays with paradox. Some bounces may bring us up short. “It’s not an it even to itself,” he writes. We want to name, identify, articulate, and classify the bouncing thought, the moving logos.
We’d like to think of it as an it. But there’s no it there; it’s process all the way down. The repetition of “it,” “it’s,” repetition, as Foucault observed of Andy Warhol’s soup cans or multiple Marilyn lips, is an emptying out of meaning, a self-consuming mantra. “It” is pre-verbal, not in the sense of being silent or dumb, but in enabling, opening up a space for words to play, to flourish, to open themselves and find meanings we and they never suspected.
“Mind shows when the flow is knowing.” All things flow. We do and do not step twice into the same river. Flowing can be knowing, and knowing (or gnosis) is always flowing. “Mind shows”: not that “mind” sits back on the sidelines and pronounces judgment to confirm that knowledge has been achieved, but rather that mind flares up; it shows itself, makes an appearance, when the flowing is a knowing. Thoughts are not in me, but I am in thought, said Charles Peirce when he was deconstructing Descartes’ mental substance.
Showing itself – this is an exemplary case of the middle voice, neither active nor passive, that runs through the bouncing thoughts and volatile thoughts that Quasha allows to speak out. Greek is a philosophical language; among other reasons, because of its well-developed middle voice. Some colloquial Anglophone analogues: “the situation unfolds,” “shit happens.” Phenomenology is a triumph of the middle voice. Heidegger lets phenomenology happen by recalling that the middle voice Greek phainesthai should be translated as “it shows itself.” The phenomenon is neither subject nor object. For Quasha language emerges and shows itself in preverbs.
Shine through or see through or more.
Every two is manyer than you think and a splitting y in the middle.
We fork by nature.
Glossodelia Attract (preverbs), “speaking animate” 12
There is a truly wonderful, wonder-inducing, generative, and originary dimension (an unmeasurable measure) here. Shining and seeing in this verbal paradise are always plural. If “man” is “a poor, bare, forked animal” (as Lear says), then the forking is “manyer” always a multiplying. Every two is more than two. To see only two roads diverging is short-sighted. Someone said: “There are two kinds of people, those who divide everything into two and those who do not.” The forking continues, we’re happy to wonder and wander further in Quasha’s verbal paradise.